July Chicago Ruby Group Meeting

Last night was the Chirb.org July meeting. On the agenda was John Long of Radiant fame. The talk really hit home with me as content management is an every day struggle in my profession. Radiant looks great and it is obvious that John has put a lot of hard (and successful) work into it.

John posted his slides from the talk on the Radiant site (which is powered by Radiant). Below are my chicken scratch notes…

Radiant - John Long

• Showed old way with php, man could i relate with that. This hit home with me coming from a PHP background but others seemed a bit confused.
• Pages are made up of several parts. (good point, it’s not just about header and footer)
• layouts stored in database (this is good and bad, I wish I could edit them on the filesystem cause I’m techy like that but I’ll get over it)

Tags

• radius - templating language, really fricken sweet
• if tags are good, why not use them everywhere? well, in radiant you can
• you can define global tags by opening the Behavior::Base class

Text Filters

• each page part can have a different text filter
• drop dead easy to implement, comes out of the box with plain text, textile and markdown

Radiant Behaviors

• the idea is to seperate data from how it acts; seperate backend from front end
• built in behaviors- page missing (context sensitive which is cool), archive, archive index, env dump (for debugging)

Radiant Mantra’s

• Less is More (don’t get rid of the kitchen sink)
• Create building blocks (let others build the buildings)
• Empower users. (don’t patronize them)
• Target the 80% window (information oriented websites not communities)

Tip

• if dev.domain.com it will be development server (this will make no sense to anyone else reading this, oh well)

Future

• Plugin System - built on top of existing rails plugin system
• Attachments (image uploads, etc., done with tags, easily make galleries or link to several files)
• Comments (better blogging support)
• Search (currently only does like query)
• Workflow with Roles (publishers, editors and writers, not complex though hopefully)
• Version Control (the simple version)

My Questions

• caching? 5 minutes, empty cache all at once if you want
• multiple behaviors? no, just one per page
• what happens if you call a content part that doesn’t exist for a page? answer: nothing rendered, doesn’t blow up on you which is cool